Pale Horse: The Scourge of Smallpox

Mon, 16 November 2015

Smallpox is the greatest killer disease in the history of the human race and also the most contagious. For more than 30 years, it has been totally eradicated from the globe. But the old Soviet Union cultivated the virus and it weapon-ized tons of the diabolical stuff. Today, U.S. intelligence experts know that hundreds of laboratories around the world are feverishly trying to artificially produce it.

After 9/11, the Bush administration launched a ponderous but massive campaign to produce a new generation of smallpox vaccine: Today, the United States finally has almost enough smallpox vaccine to inoculate every man, woman and child in the country.

In June 2001, the U.S. government had only had 12 million doses of smallpox vaccine for a population of 280 million. Today, the U.S. national stockpile holds contains 300 million doses of standard smallpox vaccine.

This sounds good. But incredibly nobody has been inoculated with the vaccine and they’re not going to be unless it’s too late. Yet smallpox spreads like wildfire through human breath. It is the most contagious and difficult to contain of all the horrific contagious diseases in history. Therefore the time to inoculate the American people against it is before any outbreak begins, not after the fact.

Smallpox is the greatest killer in human history. It depopulated the Americas nearly 500 years ago when it was introduced by the Spanish Conquistadores. It killed up to half a billion people (that’s half a billion, not half a million) in the past century. Scientists estimate that as little as 100 years ago, one in every 12 children in the entire world died young because of smallpox.

A huge global health initiative primarily funded by those evil agents of economic imperialism, the great U.S. charitable foundations, did succeed in totally exterminating smallpox in the 1970s. However, the Soviet Union – that ever-flowing source of benign scientific and technological achievement – retained samples of the smallpox virus and they weren’t the only ones to do it.

Soviet scientists successfully grew and weaponized large quantities of the virus to create a potentially even greater deadly and disgusting menace than the atomic bomb. Several RS-20V Voyevoda – NATO designation SS-18 Satan – intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicle (MIRV) warheads were adapted so that their warheads consisted not of thermonuclear weapons but of aerosol-prepared smallpox viruses. Each SS-18 could reliably carry up to 10 MIRV warheads. When any or all of those warheads exploded over an American or European city, they would have spread smallpox far and wide.

They still can.

Smallpox is terrifying for three reasons.

First, it causes appalling scarring and disfigurement for life, even among its survivors Worse, even by the standards of contagious diseases, its victims suffer greatly before they die, as they usually do.

Second, smallpox cannot be cured. Like so many other viral diseases, the course of the disease, once it is acquired, cannot be stopped. Its effects on the victims are truly horrific.

Third, and worst of all, smallpox is the most contagious deadly disease imaginable. Any reasonably organized government can quickly stop typhus and cholera, two of the other greatest killers in human history in their tracks. Nothing can tame smallpox except eradicating it. Smallpox is spread simply by the human breath. It is even more faster-spreading and communicable than the flu.

The medical technology to protect the human race from smallpox has actually been around a very long time, since 1796, to be exact. The famous English research Edward Jenner in one of the earliest classic research projects of modern medicine developed a generally safe and reliable method of inoculating human beings against it using derivatives of the similar but much milder cowpox disease.

Until less than 40 years, all U.S. schoolchildren, as well as those in almost all other industrial nations, were routinely inoculated against smallpox. But then the disease was eradicated and virtually all supplies of vaccines destroyed. It was an incredibly dangerous and stupid move.

Currently, U.S. intelligence analysts conservatively estimate that at least 700 illegal laboratories around the world are trying to grow the smallpox virus. Information on its DNA structure has even been naively posted by legitimate research institutions on the Internet. The FBI has worked hard to discourage that practice, but it has no legal powers to enforce compliance. There is no doubt that some jihadi groups have been working hard to either acquire some stocks of smallpox, or to create their own.

The only real defense for the American people – and any targeted nation – against this diabolical scourge is to mass-inoculate the entire population.

So why did both the Bush and the Obama administrations lacked the guts to inoculate their country’s population?

Bush policymakers decreed that to avoid panic, lawsuits and a small number of adverse reactions to the vaccine, even when enough of it was produced, it would only be distributed and given to people in areas after an initial outbreak had occurred. Obama, passive-passive as usual, has accepted that criminally stupid ruling.

This combination of complacency, ignorance and criminal incompetence is hard to beat. Modern mass communications, jet aircraft, trade and the universal availability of automobiles in the United States mean that once an outbreak occurs it would be quite simply impossible to contain it. Sweeping quarantine regulations backed by the most stringent martial law regulations would be required. The recent Ebola scare over a threat that is minor compared with smallpox showed how reluctant many authorities and individuals even in the health service were to recognize and accept the need for stringent quarantine procedures.

Our old friends of the ACLU and every Harvard Law School graduate in creation would be up in arms whining about the abuse of civil rights if people were forced to be in vaccinated against their will.

By the time the decision-makers woke up, it would be too late and millions would be dying in agony with their faces monstrously scared and the skin literally disintegrating off their bodies.

Has the Obama administration proved any more responsible, efficient, competent, courageous or concerned about the smallpox threat than its Bush-era predecessors were? The answer of course is, “No.”

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